Slow Astrophotography stacking performance on relatively new hardware

[Herokuretsu]

Hello all,

I am new to Affinity Photo but I see a lot of posts in the forum with performance issues but no solution or suggestion for a solution provided.

Here is my problem:

I have tried stacking 900 lights of 1” exposure and also use 50/50/50 of Bias/Darks/Flats at 80% best frames and after 3 hours I gave up.

For comparison DSS took about 1h.

I am running an i7 14700k, with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and an RTX4070. Drive is a Samsung 980Pro 1TB SSD and hardware acceleration is on.

Any ideas why it’s so slow?

Is there anything I can do to make it faster. I really liked Affinity Photo and I want to buy the full universal license but this slow performance is making it difficult.

I would love to use one application for all my work and Affinity Photo does all I want expect that it’s very slow when stacking.

I would really appreciate the help here.

Thanks.

[NotMyFault]

Try to stack a much smaller number, e.g. 20 images, and measure the time. Most Affinity operations scale linearly with number of images, so you get a reasonable estimate about the total runtime for 900 images.

during stacking, check with task manager or resource monitor how much cpu, gpu, ram, disk is used. 
Often one of these ressources is a bottleneck, letting all others under-utilized.

On windows, use power settings for „max performance“, start with a freshly bootet PC, close all other apps, disable screensaver.

Sometimes disabling hyperthreading gives better throughput.

If Affinity settings little can be done.

check if Affinity starts to use the „personal backup file“, then you have severe lack of RAM, performance degrades dramatically.